COLUMN ONE : The Media Take a Pounding : Pentagon rules and instant communication have changed the way war is reported. Reporters come off as clumsy villains in the Gulf drama.

It may have been the strongest signal yet of who is losing the political battle of the Persian Gulf war.

NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” recently opened with a skit pointedly satirizing not Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, or President Bush, or U.S. commander Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, or even Vice President Dan Quayle.

Instead, the skit shredded the American press corps. Every question that the red-eyed media horde asked at a mock Pentagon briefing seemed designed to help the enemy.

Being the butt of jokes on late-night television is not the only sign that the press has come to be seen as a clumsy villain in the Gulf War drama. Sen. Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.) recently accused Cable News Network’s Baghdad correspondent Peter Arnett of being an Iraqi “sympathizer.” Frankly, say CNN executives, Simpson was only piling on: Callers and letter writers to CNN have denounced Arnett from the beginning.

And polls show the public agrees with the military that there should be rigid restrictions on reporters in the Persian Gulf, rules most journalists say are limiting and perhaps even distorting public perception of the war.

A key factor, both military and press officials agree, is that the public is seeing the bulk of the reporting process as it happens, in military briefings. And gathering news, like making sausage or making laws, is not always an attractive sight.

Reporters shouting questions and trying to pry information often look rude, dense and disorganized on television--especially when going up against briefers trained to appear as officers and gentlemen and who can claim military security and saving lives whenever they refuse to answer a question.

And frankly, journalists admit, some questions are dumb. One reporter, for instance, recently asked briefers whether Iraqi optical antiaircraft artillery might change the course of the war. No, the officer said politely, this wouldn’t help the enemy much. Optical targeting merely means the Iraqis had abandoned their ineffective radar and were aiming their guns by eyesight.

In addition to seeing news gathered, the public’s ability to see the war from all sides instantly also has made the media far more a weapon--and a target--than in any previous war.

Iraq, for instance, followed its purported peace offer last week with another more private message to the West: It invited more U.S. news organizations to Baghdad, with the obvious intent that this would help tell the Iraqi side of the story.

“In the age of instant communications, the political context is every bit as important as the military,” noted one senior U.S. Army official.

The press now finds itself huddled in a new and uncomfortable political bunker: It has reduced access to real news, more sides are effectively manipulating it, and its reputation is being damaged to boot.

As a measure of how far the role of the wartime press has changed, it seems inconceivable today, analysts say, that any media institution or personality could emerge as a surrogate public voice and sway public opinion in the dramatic way that Walter Cronkite did during Vietnam.

The press rarely has ranked highly in public esteem. But “my sense is we have rarely been seen as distasteful as we are right now,” said Jack Fuller, a Vietnam veteran who is now the editor of the Chicago Tribune.

Some, such as John Balzar, a Los Angeles Times correspondent in Saudi Arabia, put it more personally: “I was a sergeant in Vietnam and now I am a journalist here. In both wars, I feel like I’m in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I am going to go home and have people throw rocks at me.”

If anything, anger at the press has increased since Sen. Simpson’s remarks last week, editors say. The Philadelphia Inquirer saw a deluge of anger directed at it this week, for example, after it reported that allied troops faced shortages of certain types of munitions needed for a ground war, citing Pentagon, congressional and arms industry experts.

Readers called to criticize the paper as “unpatriotic” and for giving information that will “help the enemy.” The Inquirer contends it was trying to point up problems that needed correcting to save American lives.

And the criticism is not only from one side. At an anti-war protest in Washington last month, demonstrators held signs declaring, “Does Anyone Have Less Credibility Than George Bush? Yes! The Media.”

Most evidence suggests people still believe what they are reading and seeing of the war. A recent Los Angeles Times Poll found that 65% of Americans think the press is offering an “accurate picture,” versus 28% who do not. And 62% think the press is “unbiased” in its coverage of the war. The survey polled 1,822 Americans from Feb. 15-17 and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Nonetheless, an overwhelming majority of Americans want the press controlled. Seventy-nine percent approve of the Pentagon’s restrictions, and 57% favor even stricter rules, a Times Mirror survey found last month.

That comes as no surprise to the Pentagon. “We knew from doing our homework that the public would support our position on restricting the press,” said one senior military official involved in shaping Pentagon press policy.

The Pentagon has been studying how to conduct a television war for more than a decade, in planning sessions, military exercises, war college classes and through models of other recent military actions.

The conclusion, military planners say, was that the press in the era of instant global communications had to be carefully controlled. Pictures in particular are a powerful weapon, which could aid the enemy and demoralize morale at home.

A key model became the Falklands War, in which British authorities kept reporters on board ships and briefed them only after engagements occurred. Often, reporters in London had more information, released by government officials there, than did the journalists in the field.

The Persian Gulf arrangements mirror the Falklands experience. The briefings take place in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, but the reporters who actually travel with troops, in organized and escorted pools, are kept in Dhahran, about 250 miles away.

But unlike the Falklands War, CNN televises the Gulf War briefings in Riyadh and Washington live, which may be making things even worse for the press.

“People see trained briefers who know something,” said Stephen Hess, a senior analyst at Brookings Institution.

“Put them up against reporters (who) often don’t know anything . . . who are tongue-tied and often inarticulate. . . . The setting doesn’t leave you with a sense that (the journalists) are terribly in command of their profession.”

After an especially tortuously worded query from a reporter at the daily Pentagon briefing Friday, for example, Lt. Gen. Thomas W. Kelly prefaced his answer by saying, “I’d like to sit down and diagram that sentence one day.” The press corps broke into laughter at the expense of their colleague.

One reason for such bumbling moments by the press is that journalism is a form of improvisation. News by definition is what is new and unexpected, and finding it often means groping to ask the right question at the right time.

In addition, many of the journalists covering the Gulf War are new to the Pentagon. Normally, military officials say only about 25 reporters cover the beat full time. Now there are more than 100 on hand for the daily briefing.

“We have a lot of former food editors coming down here,” said NBC Pentagon correspondent Fred Francis.

Pentagon officials calls them “the tourists.” A sign in the Pentagon press room reads “Welcome Temporary War Experts.” And the situation in Saudi Arabia, veteran war correspondents admit, is similar.

The effect of all this was not lost on Pentagon planners.

“We knew the way that reporters act in a news conference is antithetical to the way you should act when you are a guest in someone’s home,” said the senior military official. And in live, televised briefings, reporters, in effect, are guests in people’s homes.

Some in journalism criticize the media--not only for their poor showing in briefings but for allowing themselves to be put in a position where they have to rely on the briefings so heavily.

“I am not sure that we did a particularly good job of preparing for the kind of war we were in, and so we flail about and we do it in front of everybody,” said Burl Osborne, editor of the Dallas Morning News.

Bill Kovach, curator of the Neiman Foundation at Harvard, said, “We all saw this coming and we didn’t do anything about it.”

One reason is that the press is notoriously poor at collective planning, Kovach said. If it were more flexible, major news organizations could have agreed together to reject the pool idea at the outset.

The Pentagon proposed the pool idea after the invasion of Grenada in 1983, when journalists were kept away. During the 1989 invasion of Panama, when the pool system did not work well, the primary criticism from the press was that the Pentagon did not take it seriously.

Now, in retrospect, “you are accusing us of taking it too seriously,” Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams said at a meeting with Washington bureau chiefs on the brink of war.

The U.S. military is not alone, perhaps, in understanding the potential of technology better than the media itself. Baghdad apparently has gotten the message too.

“I think satellite instant communication has made it a little bit easier for those who are inclined to use propaganda to do so,” said Osborne of the Dallas Morning News. “The Iraqis can bring in a group of Western correspondents and choose what they want them to see and that is out and on the air and in the living rooms before anyone has time to think about it, before it gets sifted, or interpreted.”

This is a far cry even from Vietnam, when film was shipped overnight to Tokyo, giving officials, experts and the media a chance to add context and interpret the event. Any claim or counterclaim “would be pretty well surrounded by whatever possibilities there were before it made air,” Osborne said.

“The technology has totally changed the rules,” said Garth Jowett, a specialist in propaganda and the history of communications at the University of Houston. “The fact that messages flow as freely as they do changes the whole synergy of public reaction to war.”

Consider the telephone caller who this week told Ed Turner, CNN’s executive vice president, that his network, to create a proper editorial balance, should have countered pictures of dead civilians in Baghdad with pictures showing how Iraq had destroyed Kuwait.

“He was an intelligent man, and he was angry and there was no way I could explain to him that (the pictures from Baghdad were) not an editorial statement by this company,” Turner said.

The distance between Turner and his viewer may suggest that in the era of instant global communications, the press has not yet come to grips with what balance now means for the public.

Journalists might even need to consider the impact of news more--at least the impact on the audience. Historically, journalists have argued that this was beyond their limits.

In previous wars, governments--and the public--looked more to other forces than the press to play out this battle for hearts and minds, propaganda expert Jowett said. In World War II, the government’s Office of War Information sat in on story meetings and reviewed scripts of movies and newsreels. Today, these media are too slow to be meaningful part of the propaganda war.

The tensions between the military, the public and the press “will probably get worse before it gets better,” says the Brookings Institution’s Hess. “As the press becomes more frustrated, they are going to become lone rangers, break away from the pack, and that is not going to be a sympathetic stance in public.”

Already, there are signs that more reporters are breaking away from their escorts and signs, too, that the response by military authorities to these incidents is becoming more extreme.

Alabama National Guard troops recently held Time magazine photographer Wesley D. Bocxe blindfolded and at gunpoint for most of 36 hours when he stopped to photograph a convoy of tanks many miles south of the Kuwait border. They considered him a spy and accused him of faking his press credentials before finally turning him loose.

Journalists also report being punished and threatened with losing their access or their chances for key interviews if they write stories that Pentagon officials consider critical. Military officials have accused reporters of being “anti-military” for writing tough stories, and several Pentagon officials in the Gulf spend significant time analyzing stories in order to make recommendation on how to sway coverage in the Pentagon’s favor.

A key question now is how the public will react to press coverage of a ground war, and the heavier American casualties likely to accompany it. Many think that the press is headed for even more trouble, since it will no longer be able to play its traditional role during ground combat.

That role, said William M. Hammond, a historian on the military and the media at the U.S. Army Center of Military History, was one in which the press represented the foot soldier, if not always the officers, generals or politicians. That certainly was the role played by Ernie Pyle, perhaps the most famous print war correspondent in World War II, who frequently chronicled the GI’s complaints about poor conditions, food, or medical care.

There are other factors in the current unpopularity of the press. This is the first war in which the press is viewed as part of the powerful elite, and an object of public skepticism and even alienation, said Karlyn Keene, editor of American Enterprise magazine.

Keene blames the TV era. Reporters are now celebrities, their salaries and private lives written about and promoted by their news organizations in the manner of movie stars and musicians.

As a result, the public no longer perceives the press as its surrogate. Anchormen such as Peter Jennings are not avuncular, trusted figures in the manner of Cronkite or Chet Huntley. The former has been called “the most trusted man in America.”

It seems unlikely indeed, mused Bob Lichter, director of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, whether any media figure today could play the role Cronkite did in Vietnam.

Cronkite visited Vietnam shortly after the bloody Tet offensive of 1968. When he returned, CBS News aired a prime-time special during which Cronkite made history. “It is increasingly clear,” he declared in an unusually subjective report, “that the only rational way out . . . will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.”

When former President Lyndon B. Johnson heard Cronkite’s broadcast, he turned to an aide and remarked that, if he had lost Cronkite’s support, then he had lost the country’s as well.

Journalist David Halberstam later wrote, “It was the first time in American history that a war had been declared over by a correspondent.”

It may also be the last.